GoPro’s Plus subscription service now offers replacements of broken cameras

Whether the action cam business can alone sustain the GoPro business (in light of the recent Karma drone program shutdown) is going to at least rely on them continuing to dominate it and find new revenue streams within it.

Part of this strategy will be continuing to refine the company’s $4.99 per month subscription service, GoPro Plus. Today, the company is announcing changes to the service that should make it a bit more worthy of your money.

One of the Plus’s new big selling points will undoubtedly be that users are now able to get replacements if they break their GoPro. It’s not free, but it’s a charge equivalent to about 20 percent of the camera’s MSRP. This is going to be a strong appeal for the more extreme users who are pushing the limits of the hardware and might worry about whether their next stunt could spell disaster for their camera. Users will be able to get up to two new cameras per year, no questions asked.

In addition to discounts on accessories and better phone support, a big appeal for more mainstream consumers has largely centered on the automatic storage space the company allows, which gives users unlimited photo storage and space for about 35 hours of video footage. In the past this has only been possible through connecting the GoPro to your computer and uploading that way; next month, the company will let users do all of this wirelessly through the GoPro app.

The company’s top-of-the-line GoPro Hero6 Black brought 5ghz Wi-Fi support, which sped up the still incredibly lengthy upload times; this 3x improvement brings a lot more utility to this feature even though you’ll still have to be patient. The feature arrives for Plus subscribers on iOS on February 20 and comes to Android in the spring.